The main pro of CakePHP is "bake" functionality and use of conventions, which, if you follow them and buy into them you can really create some complex, large applications quite fast. Faster than any other PHP framework I've ever used, and I've tried all the popular ones.

However, my issues with Cake are as follows:

The ORM is slow. Slower than many of the alternatives. It's queries sometimes do strange things like querying 2 tables separately instead of using a join and I've often faced memory issues stemming from the ORM.

The code conventions, while since 3 they have adopted PSR-2 are still a long way to go to being as compliant with the many PSRs as say, Laravel and Symfony. For example the controllers have an "initialize" method which is doing what you would/should do in __construct. Bugs me.

The template layer needs to be Twig and not the ctp one. This is where the conventions fall apart and I've seen controller code, and tonnes of php logic in views because ctp offers nothing useful, unlike twig or blade templates which are very clean in comparison.

That said I work on a project with hundreds of models and controllers and it holds up really well. I couldn't imagine the same application in Laravel or Symfony. It would be a mess.